In the October issue of Locus Magazine, Kameron Hurley wrote about finding a personal mission, one that we create, adapt, and revise over time. I've been thinking a lot about why I write and what change I want to achieve with narrative, but today it feels especially important to rewrite my Ars Poetica with some straightforward promises to see myself forward.

After a long hiatus, it’s good to be back to the blog and to my many projects in the works. The story of how and why I’m back is best left to the annals of time because it’s too serious and boring for this stage. On to the good stuff!

Games, by virtue of their interactive nature, ask you to make choices as a character. The better the game, the more complicit you’ll feel in the story when you make those choices. The path of your own agency can tell you a lot about yourself, even when you think you’re playing make-believe. This time around, I cozied up to Tea for Three’s role-playing romantic Regency adventure, Regency Love.

The autumn after I finished my MFA, I took a gap year. I didn’t realize it at the time, but that one year separated my life as a student and my life as a professor. I went to visit my cousins in England (miss you guys!). There I traveled and avoided having feelings about the world for a while. The following year I was back, structuring my syllabi and teaching writing, the only thing I really knew how to do.

Viola tells him that the woman “sat like Patience on a monument, / Smiling at grief.” Viola uses it to illustrate a woman's constancy to the Duke, but her concept of smiling at grief has had more pertinent applications for me recently.